They’re all the same, these guys. Guys in charge of women. I ought to know. I’ve known enough.
And I know something else. Jake is not going to catch Linda out. He can wait all day to pounce, search her big pouchy bag and her bouncy bra. Even look inside one of her books to see if the pages have been carved out.
Do you know why?
It’s because what they think is the evidence against her isn’t. They ask, how can she afford all those cabs? She must go off in the taxi three, four times a week, and then back again. Who on earth in Evening Eye has money for that? And if she does, where does she get it from?
I wouldn’t put it past Jake to follow Linda around out of hours, to try to find where she sells the bags she supposedly nicks. Try to catch her going to a market and approaching a fashion trader who’ll give her a tenth what they retail for in Harrods, and she’ll be grateful for it.
But he can’t follow her all day and all night.
If he wants to know about Linda, what he ought to do is take up smoking. He ought to come out on the doorstep where I go and see what I see while I’m out there.
I told you, smokers these days, we see things that other people don’t. If Jake was to come out with me on the doorstep, and pay attention, he’d see Linda come out there or four times a week to her waiting taxi. And he’d see her arrive back at work at two minutes to two. Regular as clockwork.
But what he’d also see is that it’s always the same taxi. Linda’s shagging the taxi driver. Obvious. To anybody who cares to look. If any money’s changing hands, it isn’t coming out of Linda’s purse. That’s what Jake would see if he came out to socialise with the smokers.
But I very much hope he doesn’t. If he was to start hanging out with us smokers it would put a serious cramp in my style. That’s because it’s me who is taking the occasional bag, and passing it over to Molly from the double-glazing at break times for her to sell to her mate on the market.
She gets a tenth what they sell for in Harrods. So I get a twentieth. But that’s fine with me. Every little bit helps. Not least because they’re bloody expensive these days, cigarettes.
The Spy’s Retirement by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
I have faced the cavalry of Ayub Khan and ridden a war pony stolen from the Pashtu, as its owner swept down a rocky gully behind me, brandishing a rifle. I rode with Karim Bey across the Wild Pass in the Serbian rebellion of seventy-eight. I have seen a major in the Bengal Lancers take a wild pig through the fundament, only to have his spear bury itself into sun-baked mud beneath.
Good days. I miss them.
My name is Colonel John Hamish Watson, late of the Bombay Sappers and Miners. I know the weight behind a charging horse. I have faced it and lived. Four fine horses harnessed to a carriage whipped by one of the Queen’s own coachmen carries enough force to smash a stone wall. So you will understand why I had little hope for the fool who stepped into my path on the high road through Kingston upon Thames.
There was, of course, little reason for my coachman to be whipping his horses so fast but I like to make my journeys at speed; the empire is large, the number of us who play the game surprisingly small and the rules complex, as you will realise from the fact I fought at Stara Planina with Karim Bey rather than the Serbs.
The first I knew of disaster was a shout from Hunter, followed by the frantic neighing of his horses and a thud. Something heavy catapulted across the roof of the carriage and tore varnished canvas above my head. A woman shouted, and the carriage tipped sideways.
We travelled maybe five paces before the first of the horses went down, tripping that behind. The scream of a wounded animal is something one never loses. It was such a scream, heard in the hills behind Kandahar, which convinced me Mr Darwin was correct and we did not, after all, rank between the angels and the animals. A man with his leg badly broken sounds little different to a horse in similar straits.
Using a window, which now showed only clouds, weak sunlight and the grey of an English sky, I crawled from the carriage, to find Hunter already knelt beside the head of a magnificent grey, tears in his eyes.
‘Done for,’ Hunter said. ‘Legs, ribs… All broken.’ For Hunter this was almost a speech.
‘Bad luck,’ I said. Undoing my loden coat, I loosened a holster that kept a Bulldog in place. ‘Here.’
Taking my proffered revolver in silence, the coachman put its blunt muzzle to the side of his horse’s head.
‘At the back,’ I suggested, ‘or directly from the front. I can do it if you’d rather.’
Hunter stared at me, although it’s unlikely he saw much.
‘Let me,’ I said, and when he looked doubtful, in as much as a face carved from Irish oak can carry that expression, I admitted something few people know about me. ‘I have a fine understanding of anatomy.’
‘You, sir?’
‘I used to be a surgeon.’
There are advantages in my world to being seen as a coldblooded killer, and to admit to saving as many as I had killed. Such admissions can do harm. Although the truth is far stranger, because I have killed fewer people than most believe and saved many more than I am prepared to admit.
Taking the revolver from Hunter, I clicked back the hammer and clambered across a broken shaft to reach the animal’s head. Speak kindly and most people will give you their trust. The same applies to animals. With one hand I stroked the dying animal and with the other I put my revolver between its eyes and pulled the trigger. It died with a kick and a spasm, but the fact its skull contained myriad cavities did much to baffle the sound and gave me an idea for later.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Hunter said, thus using up another week’s worth of words.
It was only then I remembered the unfortunate cause of our crash. I could see where he lay by the interest his agony attracted. A smaller crowd had come together around my wrecked carriage, drawn by its quality, but a far larger crowd was gathered a dozen paces behind this, and it was here the human cause and casualty of our accident lay.
They grew quiet at my approach, the crowd. Men fell back and women looked away, averting their eyes. A small girl burst into tears and a youth old enough to know better stared openly into my face. That was when I realised it was my revolver which earned their silence.
‘You have killed me…’ The voice was high, slightly strange and the man who spoke indeed looked on the edge of death, which was an improvement on what I had been expecting.
‘It is always a bad idea to step in front of a moving carriage,’ I replied, unwilling to have him meet God believing the fault mine.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘fetch me a doctor…’
He had the hollow face of a classics master and the fingers of a second violinist, somewhat bitten around the nails. Behind me, I could hear muttering and a woman bustled forward, mouth already opening to share her news. ‘A doctor recently took residence in a street behind.’ Several of the crowd began to agree, and one, a clerk from his dress, which was careful if none too clean, crouched beside me and offered to fetch this man.
I am a…
I almost said those words aloud, but instead I gave the clerk a guinea, to show the doctor his fee would be paid and told the man to run as swiftly as possible. Had I done what first occurred to me and announced myself a medical man, my coming retirement might have been very different.
‘Tell your doctor to hurry,’ I said. ‘This patient needs urgent attention.’
A man running is always a ridiculous sight and the clerk confirmed this fact, his feet slapping cold cobbles and his elbows flexing like the wings of a game bird. A handful of seconds after he started, he disappeared down a narrow alley in a sideways skid that almost had him on his back. With nothing else to occupy the seconds, I sat back and waited.